Being an internationally beloved screen icon doesn’t necessarily make you a good actor. Alas, I come to you with a heavy heart to share that Arnold Schwarzenegger, a performer I love with a primacy usually reserved only for close blood relatives, really has no business making a drama. I give the odd, small film Maggie all the points in the world for experimenting with genre-blending and subverting audience expectations, but there’s just too much about it that fails to connect. I never want to be a critic that demands actors, or stories for that matter, should “stay in lane”, but if you insist on swimming upstream, you better have enough stamina.
Maybe the trouble lies in the the double-whammy: seeing Arnold try to emote (yes, at one point a single tear rolls down his face, like snow melting on the side of Mount Rushmore), as well as Maggie’s attempt to fuse a dour indie drama with the tropes of dystopian fantasy. As in the recent Interstellar, we begin in the American heartland on the brink of (or maybe on the rebound from?) total collapse. There’s a viral zombie infection in the air, but society soldiers on, listening not just to emergency broadcasts, but specific, recognisable programming like NPR. The rate of infection is dropping due to some draconian measures involving unseen quarantine zones. If everyone follows the rules, they may just get through this.
We first meet Maggie as she’s picked up by her father, Wade (Schwarzenegger), at a hospital. For reasons never quite explained, she went out to the city, and it’s presumably there where she got bitten. Despite Wade’s enormous build (and never-addressed Austrian accent, which I imagine is unusual for farms outside Kansas City), he is powerless to help his daughter. Once bitten, there will eventually come “the turn”.
It’s the waiting period that differentiates Maggie from other zombie stories. There are usually eight weeks between exposure and a victim’s debut as a flesh-gobbling monster. You’d think there’d be a set structure, but the impression is that everyone on Earth is still dealing with this one day at a time. And until your big day comes when someone must either dump you off at a quarantine zone, from which only rumours escape, or shoot you, you basically just go home and try to live your life.
It isn’t that easy, of course, and what you’ve paid to see isn’t Arnold mowing down zombies (though there is a tiny bit of this), it’s Arnold staggering through agonised limbo as he tries to avoid thinking about what he’ll do when he has to put his daughter down. That’s a serious bit of business, of course, and certainly has potential. Unfortunately, the road there is extremely slow. The moments when Arnold just has to look like a lion with a thorn in his paw work okay, but when he’s got dialogue to deliver, well, that’s when you realise why he’s never done heavier material like this before.
Maggie is lacking in action, so must rely on its performances to succeed. The casting certainly makes it notable as a curiosity, but as cinema it’s the hobbling dead.
